Dispatch #44: I Am Not Now Nor Have I Ever Been

Chloe Grace Moretz

by Lupe Fernandez

Chloe Grace Moretz swaggers by me on the sidewalk. Her leather jacket and torn jeans make her look tough. I'm offended she doesn't say hi. I mean, what the F??? man, we're friends.

She catches the same bus I'm riding and sits across the aisle. I look at her and she still pretends she doesn't know me. Well, if she's going to be rude, I guess there's nothing I can do.

While the bus is in motion, Chloe Grace, as she likes to be called - notices me, leans out of her seat and hugs me across the aisle. I feel better.

I drift out of sleep. Wait. Chloe Grace Moretz is my friend? I've never met her. She's an actress in movies. I'm wide awake. Between dream and this world, I was confused. Which reality did I live in?

The night before, I finished reading I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier - most famous for The Chocolate War - and found the story chilling. A young boy, Adam Farmer, takes a harrowing bike ride across Massachusetts to visit his hospitalized father. The chapters alternate with interviews by an anonymous man of the same boy desperately attempting to remember his past. Adam Farmer - not his real name - survived an assassination attempt while in a witness protection program. He was traumatized by the murder of his parents.The cross-state bike ride is a trip around hospital grounds and all the characters Adam Farmer met are residents of a psychiatric ward.

Real. Not real. The plasticity of memory. I suspect the book's theme created the confusion in my dream.

Like Adam, I was convinced my memories were accurate. Chloe Grace Moretz was my friend. Except, she wasn't.

While I am awake, I write about people who don't exist, but I treat as if they walk, talk, eat, love. I want the reader to believe they exist, even if the story plainly labeled fiction. We collaborate, collude, conspire to take a trip across a landscape of smells, sounds and sights, populated by fragments of parents, friends and strangers.

I'm not the only one. Thousands of others knowingly create alternate experiences on a regular basis. In cyber tech, it's called virtual reality.

In my sleep, it's called a dream.

Mariska Hargitay

I wonder, are dreams the original virtual reality technology? Organic. Portable. Not owned by a major trading partner. Not yet, anyway.

Now, you know who I'd really like to meet on the bus?
 

Dispatch 14: Fragile Memory

by Lupe Fernandez

"We were watching TV in her house," my mother tells me about one of her sisters, "and then she stood up and said, 'This isn't my house.' What are all my things doing here? Who moved my pictures and my clothes? I want to go home."

My mother's sister storms out of the impostor house.

"Let me go with you," my mother follows her sister out into the dark street. Her sister walks down the sidewalk, stops and looks around. She spots a house down the block with the lights on. "That's my house. What are those people doing in my house?"

My mother doesn't want her sister intruding on someone else's home. "Why don't we wait in the house?" My mother gestures to her sister's house. "We don't know how long those people will be in there. We can wait until they leave."

Her sister reluctantly agrees. My mother and her sister return to the impostor house and sit down to watch TV. After a while, her sister looks around the living room and mutters "Hmmm..." She doesn't mention her stolen house for the rest of the night.

My mother's sister suffered from diabetes complicated by the onset of dementia.

The fragility of memory.

What separates my memories from impostor memories? What is the barrier between the known and a lost world? Three pounds of gray matter surrounded by cranial fluid and encased in a calcium skull. Synapses firing in the soft tissue. Chemical electricity transmitting molecules. That one is my first day of kindergarten. This one is my first kiss. And the bundle of neurons here is the house I live in.

Will the day come when I mistake this house for an impostor house? How thin is the divide between this world and another?

I have a reoccurring dream where I am at college, but I don't know where my next class is. A class project is due, but I can't remember what the project was. I can't even remember what the class was called. I wake up in a panic, believing I've got to get to school fast. Then I remember, I graduated college over two decades ago. I don't have to go to school anymore. For less than thirty seconds, the dream is reality and today is a dream. Is that what it is like to slip into the world of confusion? I am surging with anxiety for less than a minute. What if I am lost in a porous remembrance for days? Years?

What's it like to live in the twilight of today and yesterday? Will I know the difference? Perhaps, I'll be too scared and fight back with hostility and denial.

When I write I immerse myself in the world of the manuscripts. I run across the hot asphalt of Burbank Elementary school. I taste coppery-metallic blood in my mouth after falling out of a Mexican sky. I hear police helicopters prowling the streets of downtown Los Angeles. I feel nausea tumbling "weightless" in a rocket bound for a new planet.

I come back to chair under my butt and a keyboard on my lap when I need to edit. Perhaps one day, I won't return.

Just for today, I remember this blog, this post, this sentence.